cover image Let Nothing You Dismay

Let Nothing You Dismay

Mark O'Donnell. Alfred A. Knopf, $22 (224pp) ISBN 978-0-375-40103-9

With only five days to go before Christmas, several doses of bad luck have befallen Tad Leary, the hero of this funny, if thin, second novel by playwright and humorist O'Donnell (Getting Over Homer). Tad has been without a steady lover since he broke up with his boyfriend a year ago. Now, he has just been fired from his job as a storyteller at an exclusive Manhattan elementary school. Moreover, the actor from whom Tad sublets his West Side apartment wants it back. In the course of one day, Tad makes the rounds of six parties he's been invited to (there is a seventh, but he can't remember where or what it is). The parties are a clever device O'Donnell uses to examine and satirize a slice of Manhattan life that he appears to know down to the last hors d'oeuvre. Tad himself--a baby-faced 34-year-old grad student in folklore--""can bear reality only by dressing it in metaphor."" He comes across as the date you feel sorry for, which makes him an unpromising protagonist and delegates the vitality and fun of this very stagy novel to its over-the-top supporting cast. There's Les, Tad's formerly upwardly mobile brother, whose suicide attempt seems to have cauterized the ambition center in his brain: the last we see of him, he's walking a gingerbread man across his wife's buffet, introducing him to the doughnuts. And then there's Yoni, who ""once organized a campaign to get `all you can eat' restaurants declared illegal on health grounds""; now she works as a ""white witch, psychic masseur"" and ""erotomantic hipstress"" and plans to serve cheese made from human breast milk at her next performance. If Tad never really comes to life, it's because the novel is essentially a group satire of a New York demimonde, with Tad more a personification of a type than a character with whom we can empathize. (Nov.)